MAPPING THE PRESENT: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History by Stuart Elden, Ph. D

Pages: 240pp
Paperback ISBN: 0826458475
Hardback ISBN: 0826458467
Publisher: The Athlone Press
Publication date: 10-01-2001
 

       The primary virtue of this book is its clarity and directness that does not in any way degenerate into meaningless generalizations, something very rare in scholarly studies of philosophy. This is especially so with Heidegger and Foucault. In his study of Foucault’s “Project of a Spatial History”, Stuart Elden actually opens up much new ground in essential and fundamental subjects which are given only lip service in other studies in a rush to get to what is of already acknowledged popular interest. Hopefully this study will open real understanding for both of these philosophers because what other scholars have bypassed here is exceedingly important to understanding them as they, in fact, really thought. “Place” in Heidegger and “spatial History” in Foucault are shown to be primary concepts that should have been approached first instead of neglected, that render any understanding of Heidegger thoroughly undermined and insecure. It completely distorted Foucault into seeming to be a mere pop-philosopher instead of the major thinker Elden shows him to truly be. In fact, not only does Doctor Elden demonstrate the enormous impact of Heidegger on Foucault’s thinking, especially all of Heidegger’s writings on Nietzsche starting in time before the NIETZSCHE lectures, but, for people interested mainly in Heidegger, greatly enlarges the scope of understanding the core thinking of the earlier philosopher. Although it is obvious that Nietzsche was prominent in Foucault’s thinking, Doctor Elden clearly demonstrates that it is only through Heideggerian lenses that Foucault read Nietzsche. In doing this, he also demonstrates, though he does not mention it, the enormous shock that Heidegger’s NIETZSCHE lectures gave to Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.

        Foucault read Heidegger in the original German so his perception of Heidegger was not distorted by translation. However, of the three great French thinkers, he places the NIETZSCHE lectures in their proper spotlight as one of Heidegger’s most important texts. Doctor Elden’s approach in detail also is not over already covered ground filled with other people’s assumptions but deals with each point in an original way. For instance, instead of merely berating Heidegger’s Nazism for the ten-thousandth time, he goes into an in-depth understanding of what this really meant, especially interesting relating to the philosophy of law. Though he does not mention Mikhail Bakhtin by name, what he says about Foucault and the carnival spirit of public execution should be of great interest to Bakhtin scholars. He details the great damage of the poorly abridged English translation of Histoire de la Folie which did not at all, as Madness and Civilization, make clear the major thesis of Foucault’s book and stands in desperate need of a new version. He brings up the question of why Discipline and Punish is “framed as a history of the present.” He links “the distinction between connaissance and savoir” to his clarified notion of Heidegger’s “historical ontology.” He presents “the theoretical base” of Foucault’s relation of technology and the dispositif “that encompasses technologies of power that produce a docile body, a knowable ‘soul’, and a subjectification of the individual” versus “the supplice of the eighteenth century” with the all-important meaning of the “place” of personal, sensible body “with the ritual play of excessive pains, spectacular brandings [marques éclatantes] in the ritual of supplices” that “is one of a number of rituals by which power is manifested.” As Doctor Elden says, quoting Foucault,

The ceremonies of supplice are visual displays of power, the marks of the sovereign are left in prominent places: “Pillories, gallows and scaffolds were erected in public squares or by the roadside; sometimes the corpses of the executed persons [des suppliciés] were displayed for several days near the scenes of their crimes. Not only must people know [sachent], they must see [voient] with their own eyes.”